We want to be together...


 Last week was National Work Life Week organised by our friends at Working Families and it also coincided with a Team Emotional Health day for us at The Centre for Emotional Health. We hold three of these a year when the whole staff team, both hybrid and remote workers gather together to think, collaborate and have fun.

We spent time revisiting our strategic plan, checking in with our strategic goals and seeing what actions we had completed to achieve these goals and what had changed a year into our plan. We also considered some impact data and were reminded about why we do what we do by watching a video of some parents discussing how attending The Nurturing Programme had positively impacted their lives.

Later in the day we spent time together trying Kintsugi – the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by using lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum making a feature of the cracks. As well as being a fun activity to do together it also reminded us that good emotional health is about embracing our feelings not denying them and then learning and developing from them. That the pottery was broken was beyond our control but we did have the personal power to repair it and then celebrate that achievement. For some of us, myself included, we were also reminded of the need for patience in trying to achieve a goal!

We ate together, we walked together and in the evening, we celebrated our achievements as an organisation with an awards event featuring bougie bingo – yes it is an actual thing but I may not have spelt it correctly! As always when we gather as a team there was much laughter – some of us retired for the night with aching cheek muscles from smiling and laughing so much.

Whatever the content of the team emotional health days the most important thing by far is spending quality and concentrated time together and simply enjoying that. Relationships are at the heart of The Nurturing Programme and all we do as an organisation. Relationships are literally the life blood which enables everything else to happen and taking time to nurture these relationships is vital if we are to continue to have a positive impact as a charity whose vision is everyone living an emotionally healthy life.

What are the relationships that you value most? Do you nurture them sufficiently or do you need to do more of this? What about your workplace – is it time to do a relationships check-up? Comment or message me if you want to talk more about relationships of if we can help you in any way.

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